Antagonism Reconstructing Sanctions: EU Measures as Contested Issue

Sanctions remain a contested coercion instrument in international relations. A seemingly clear-cut mechanism of pressure translating into political change encounters persistently conflicting empirical evidence. Sanctions are haunted by recurring unintended consequences concerning the conflict they are part of. Despite increasingly sophisticated implementation procedures, there has been little effort on conceptualizing how sanctions are understood in ongoing conflict. Sanctions do not communicate their meaning along a simple sender-receiver model of communication. Instead, this paper maintains, actors construct coercive sanctions as part of antagonistic conflict relations. Advancing a sociological perspective, the paper argues that sanctions, far from being an unambiguous message, can remain a contested issue in a game of competing conflict perceptions. Such specific reconstructions of sanctions are consequential for further conflict development. Their negligence makes for one source of unintended consequences of sanctions policies.